See No Evil, Hear No Evil..

The level of cognitive dissonance is just...

Ugh. 

State of the Union

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died yesterday. I do not know her that well, and actually know her more by reputation than any research of my own, so I am sorry for her friends and family and offer my condolences, but I am not personally affected.

Unfortunately, the death of a Supreme Court Justice at this particular period of time means that nobody has even had time to properly grieve for her before the political takes started. (And in an all too typically crass move, Trump and McConnell have already indicated they'll do the best they can to fill her position quickly. Like... the very same evening the news broke. They couldn't even wait a day to say anything.)

I am... well. I'm  upset enough that I don't want to escape into fiction, but not willing to join the chorus of voices on Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr or wherever, and I'm not even sure what I really want to say. 

So I figured I'd write some things out here.

For anyone who doesn't understand how monumentally 2020 has been f-ing with everyone, let me explain this small portion of it.

In 1973 Roe vs. Wade made abortion legal. There's a bunch of other things to say about our conservative and liberal beliefs, but this is the one that has galvanized quite a few Christians to become single-issue voters, and thus has created a base that people in power have used and abused to turn 'Christians' into people who support almost the exact opposite of what Jesus preached. 

That's harsher than I normally try to be, but I'm pretty annoyed right now so I don't feel like softening it. But I'll provide a bit more background on how I came to that conclusion.

I mentioned that I was raised Catholic, right? 11 years of Catholic schooling here...

And we talked about the church's stance on the issues of our day. Abortion, contraception, assisted suicide, etc. were just some of them. What I recall the most was this:

If your argument is that life is precious, you have to be consistent. If you want to say that you are 'pro-life' and care about unborn babies, you should also be 'pro-life' and against the death penalty. Also against assisted suicide for the elderly, and various other things. (We also went to pro-life rallies, I think there's even a picture in a newspaper of my sister and myself at one of them. Mom was pretty much one of those single-issue voters, too.)

I do not and have not accepted the Church's teaching on a lot of things, but I can respect the consistency of this position.

As for why I don't accept their teachings, well... initially I tried reconciling my position through what nowadays would probably be called 'evidence based' policies. I recall readings on the various topics, like the cost of life imprisonment vs. the costs - in jail and legally - of the death penalty, and similar readings on abortion. 

Given that women still had abortions when it was illegal (and were more likely to do it in dangerous and risky fashion, so women were more likely to die of back-alley abortions), give that abortions generally came from unwanted pregnancies (which can be prevented through... oh, I don't know, maybe contraception), I would say my views at the time leaned more towards what eventually became called the 'safe, legal, and rare' position. (I also saw an article discussing a South American country that made abortion illegal, and it has some rather unexpected consequences. Like, oh, lots of mothers in prison rather than taking care of their other children.)

I don't want to digress too far in discussing my evolving views on the issue - I'll repeat a story I related before, though. I had a discussion with some of my more conservative relatives where I was arguing for the policies it takes to make abortion truly rare. Like contraception, financial support for single-mothers, etc. 

What I remembered the most of that discussion was how every possible policy option got shot down. If you created a scholarship to college for a single mother, for example, then she is actually getting more help with college than my cousin... who didn't do anything wrong an didn't make any mistakes and surely is more deserving of such help. (That's the subtext, not specifically what was said.)

And I think almost everyone knows the 'christian' position on contraception, even though making Abraham's descendants as numerous as the starts might have been important back in his time and probably isn't all that important now that we've reached a population in the billions. And even though it generally means parents either wind up with lots of kids (I'm one of six. I love all my siblings, but that's a lot to deal with financialy), or they generally just can't have sex. The rhythm method is not really reliable, you see. And, well... I don't think only having sex when you're ready to have a child is very good for a marriage. Not unless they're both asexuals or something. 

Anyways, long story short is although I don't think it's deliberate and I don't think they truly mean to... their position essentially results in punishing young girls in particular for having sex outside of marriage. Girls, because of course the boys don't suffer the consequences, and because even though grown women can and do have abortions this issue is mostly associated with unmarried teenagers. Even though grown married women have gotten abortions as well.

It's not even consistent in that regard, by the way. Some girls have sex outside of marriage and get pregnant, others don't. So some of them are then weighed down by the need to raise a child in a society where child care costs about as much as you can make at a minimum wage job, and good luck going to school when you've got a baby to feed, and yet if you don't go to school (or college in particular) you're probably going to be stuck in one of those low paying jobs for the rest of your life. In other words, this is also just one piece of the whole 'cycle of poverty', whereby people who are born without any resources find it almost impossible to break out of it no matter how hard they work. 

So anyways. Reversing Roe vs. Wade is the type of short-sighted and oversimplified solution that is probably not going to have the results they expect, but is really easy to persuade people to support. All you have to say is 'think of the millions and millions of innocent babies! It's practically another Holocaust, killing those who least deserve it.' 

What I wanted to focus on, though, is how the people on the right have used this goal to justify anything and everything. I'm not even sure how many of them are good-faith actors who sincerely care about unborn babies lives, and how many have just realized that this is a handy way to power. (Single issue voters! You can overturn all the social security measures FDR put in place, and all you have to do is show you're fighting to stop abortion and nobody cares. Nobody you care about, at least.)

What this pandemic has shown - to those who aren't so caught up in that over-simplified goal - is how bereft of moral principles those on the right have become.

After all, if you truly care about the sanctity of life, if you truly think the deaths of unborn babies is a horrific crime - how can you possibly support an administration that has caused the death of a couple hundred thousand Americans?

I will give the average Americans I run into credit for being sincere in their beliefs, even if I disagree with them. I can not do the same for the political forces that use those beliefs to get into power.

They have lost sight of everything. Of their values, their principles, their morals... they compromise all of it and claim it's justified.

And in the end, they're just as bad (if not worse) as those they claim to stand against.

The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg comes at a particular trying time for a bunch of reasons. Creating a conservative Supreme Court has been a goal of these people for a very long time, in the hopes of overturning Roe vs. Wade. 

Mitch McConnell argued that they had a right to prevent Obama from nominating a Supreme Court Justice back in 2016. He came up with some ridiculous argument about letting the election decide, even though pretty much everyone knew he was really doing it because he hoped to get a Republican in office who would nominate a conservative justice. 

He succeeded.

Now, in a moment of glaring hypocrisy if you thought he actually believed his argument in 2016, he and Trump are going to do their damndest to replace RBG with another conservative judge. One that would finally give them that conservative majority.

The stakes are high - and all it took was undermining the American system of government, lying, capitalizing on the worst in human nature, allying yourself with racists and bullies, enabling a government that allowed a pandemic to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans... but hey, they may finally get that conservative court they wanted.

All it took was everything that made them 'the good guys'. They have no morals or principles. They don't stand for life, they don't stand for truth and justice, they don't stand for a nation where 'all men are created equal'.

But yeah, okay. They might manage to overturn Roe vs Wade, make abortion illegal, and make more women die in risky illegal procedures while arresting and throwing in jail mothers and forcing young teenagers to have children that will then make it exceedingly difficult for them and their children to ever get out of poverty.

Information War Continued

 This is a direct follow up to my previous post, though it may not seem like it. The year 2020 has been disturbing and shocking on many levels, and like many of my fellow Americans I have so many questions. Like - how did it come to this? What happened? How did we get here?

Some of that debate is just as useless as assigning blame for the Massacre at Nightless City in The Untamed. Still, there is something that does get under my skin... not in the sense that I think it's responsible for everything. It's more, I don't know... the hypocrisy.

I talked before about how there were bad faith actors manipulating the situation, and credible people being manipulated. But the most irritating part was how self-righteous the cultivators became. How absolutely certain they were, that they were standing for all that is good and right. That they were doing some great service by standing up to and denouncing evil. And yet we all know that they basically looked the other way while real harm was being done. That they believed lies and rumors... and that ultimately they weren't standing on the side of truth and justice at all. 

It's the hypocrisy. And more than that. It's that if they really cared about righteousness, if they really cared about standing up for justice... they'd have actually investigated the situation. 

On the one hand, I get it. Nobody has the energy (or resources, or access) to investigate everything. At some point we have to trust other people to tell us the truth. Like cultivators trusting that the Jin guards were telling the truth about how Wen Ning died. 

On the other hand - how can you claim to stand on the side of right, when you are giving your trust to bad faith actors? And in the process allow injustice and wrong to be ignored? 

How can you not be aware of the cognitive dissonance it takes to say "this is wrong and a sign of how horribly evil the enemy is when they do it, but understandable, forgivable, and acceptable when it's us?" 

To be honest, that's what makes me so mad at so-called Christian Conservatives today. It's not so much the bad faith actors, since just about every political interest has those. It's that tendency to wrap themselves up in self-righteousness and claim it's somehow justified or good or acceptable. As if you could possibly do the whole 'build the kingdom of heaven' on such a faulty foundation.

There was a study done once, on cheating, and it talked about how some religious people wound up justifying it. The thought process was generally along the lines of bargaining with God, where they basically said "I'll cheat, so I can get into a position where I'll be able to help others." 

And... it doesn't work like that? That's not how faith and religion and righteousness is supposed to go. It's not somehow okay or acceptable to lie so long as you do good things to make up for it. (Which is not to say you should be burdened with guilt for the rest of your life or anything. There's a whole process for confession and reconciliation. It's just that the ends don't justify the means, and you can't somehow excuse bad behavior with later good behavior. In fact that's almost worse, because what else are you willing to justify doing in the belief that you'll somehow make up for it later?)

I was raised in a very religious environment, so I get the appeal of 'building the kingdom of heaven' and all that. And I'm also absolutely horrified at what some people are doing in the name of such a thing. Because the minute you decide the ends justify the means, the minute you think lying about something is in a good cause... that you'll somehow make up for it when you're in charge and going about your business...

It betrays a complete lack of understanding of just what it takes to build such a thing. It shows that your foundations are faulty, that the kingdom you're building is built on shifting sand. You're not building a kingdom of heaven on earth, you're not doing God's will, and you are not justified in sinning in order to do so.

(I hate that this sounds so morally black and white, I am reaching for the religious language of my roots to help explain how horrifying I find this.)

It really bothers me that they wrap themselves up in self-righteousness, wave the Bible around, and claim they are dong God's will even as they go against everything that the Bible says.

Trump encapsulates the problem, because they are willing to overlook and accept things they know are wrong. And they say it's because 'God works in mysterious ways', or it's some sort of sign about how He works through our fallible and flawed world, or something...

Instead of the very simple explanation that They. Are. Wrong. 

That they are justifying wrongdoing in order to gain power, that they have decided they know what God wants better than He does, and that God wants them to support someone who embodies almost everything a good Christian isn't. Someone who lies on a regular basis, who mocks disabled people, who doesn't care about the sick or the poor...

You can't build a kingdom of heaven on such poor foundations, and any attempt at doing so will fail miserably.

They might, might, end up with a theocracy... and then will probably have the types of problems that come when a theocracy is imposed with such a terrible foundation. That is, the hypocrisy and abuse of power that is practically inevitable when people think the ends justifies the means has a tendency to make people more secular and turn them away from God.

Information Warfare, Blame, and the Netflix show The Untamed

In typical fashion I'm going to talk about an entirely fictional show and then apply the topics of that discussion to the real world. Also with no regard to spoilers for said show.

And yet again I am using The Untamed to kickstart everything.

I mentioned that public perception plays a huge role in the show... and actually, it's a bit more complicated than that. The main character, Wei Wuxian, starts using powers that are disturbing to pretty much everyone else. Corpses, resentful energy, etc. It makes it very easy for people to believe nasty rumors about what he's using those powers for, with little to no relation to reality. His first life cumulates in a tragedy through a combination of rumor-mongering, his own arrogance, bad luck... and yes, some deliberate manipulation by some pretty shady characters. The degree to which each of these elements plays a role is something we could debate for hours, but that's not what this post is about. Or rather, that's only a small part of what this post is about.

See, there's a character (Jin Guangshan, though it's hard to say how much was done by him and how much was done by the bastard son he reluctantly recognized and used to do his dirty work - Jin Guangyao) who saw Wei Wuxian's abilities (able to fight thousands! On his own! And he created a powerful spritual tool - the Stygian Tiger Amulet - that helped him do so) and considered him a threat. This character also coveted the Stygian Tiger Amulet Wei Wuxian created. The story isn't quite clear on just how much he was responsible for it, but there definitely seems to have been a smear campaign in place.

They put everything Wei Wuxian did in the worst light, exaggerated his arrogance, spun outright lies implying that Wei Wuxian didn't respect his adopted brother (and now sect leader), etc. There's a really interesting scene where we see the cultivators discussing what to do about Wei Wuxian, and you see a few people try to stand up for him and defend him - and get shouted down or dismissed. 

When a pompous and arrogant Jin noble got cursed, he assumed Wei Wuxian had done it - with no proof - and gathered a couple hundred cultivators to ambush him. That ambush turned tragic when someone important died during the fight, and Wei Wuxian was blamed. Eventually it led to all the cultivators gathering together and talking about attacking Wei Wuxian, who at that point (grief-ridden, angry, and maybe a bit unhinged) invited himself to the meeting. Wei Wuxian didn't start the fight - the other side shot him first, and then attacked - but he definitely threw down. It's fiction, so it's hard to feel as upset about this as we would for real life characters, but thousands died in that fight. Really, all of our characters survived a rather nasty war... so even though the story doesn't show it they've all got blood on their hands.

Which brings me to the point, I suppose. Thousands die in what some people translate to the 'Massacre at Nightless City'. 

Is Wei Wuxian the one responsible? He was their main opponent. But... he didn't start the fight. Was it the responsibility of Jin Guangshan and Jin Guangyao, for manipulating events and painting Wei Wuxian a villain? All in their lust for power? Was it the cultivators themselves, who believed the lies and spread the gossip? Who wholeheartedly believed they were right, that they were the ones on the side of justice? 

You could go round and round assigning blame, or trying to divide it up and say that 45% was one and 20% another... but part of the beauty of this story is that it shows how pointless most of that is. There's plenty of blame to go around, and a lot of crappy things happened - now what?

The manipulators did wrong, but can you put all the blame on them? There will always be immoral people willing to justify whatever in the pursuit of power, surely they wouldn't have succeeded if others had asked the right questions, or insisted on proof. (This happened rather consistently ever since the end of the war, but stands out most significantly in the incident that first set Wei Wuxian at odds with the rest of society. They had won the war against the Wen, and the survivors were hunted down and put in work camps. For various reasons had a debt to a couple of Wen, and wound up visiting one of those camps in order to try and pay off that debt. What he found was that his own side was treating the prisoners badly... just as bad as the Wen they'd just fought a bloody war against. So even though he hated the Wen - who had destroyed his home, hurt his brother, thrown him into a rather horrible place to die, etc - he also had this debt to two of them, and could see that they weren't all bad. The people in the camps were NOT a threat. Old, civilians, even a toddler. He ends up killing some of the guards, breaking them free and taking them to live somewhere under his protection. The discussion conference about him shows that the cultivators all believe it was an unprovoked attack, the surviving guards claimed that the death of one detainee in particular was because he fell of a cliff - rather than being murdered as we'd learned earlier - and so of course to them Wei Wuxian seems out of control and a threat to all. We're not even sure whether that's a deliberate lie on Jin Guangshan and Jin Guangyao's part, or the guards coming up with a lie to protect themselves. Regardless, the Jin family didn't have any interest in finding out the truth and the rest of the cultivation world accepted their story without question.)

Should we be angry, then, at the general public? Is it their fault for believing and spreading gossip? For believing the manipulators when they outright lied? But if they were at fault - wasn't the death of thousands a bit extreme for punishment? 

That brings me to the point of all this - because there are real world parallels here. There are people who deliberately spread lies and try to manipulate the situation to their own favor. And there are people who believe those lies and take action based on those lies. 

The pandemic brings this home rather viscerally, to me at least. I had posted some months back that we could predict and prevent much of the death. We're now almost at 200,000 dead Americans and the vast majority of it did not have to happen.

Hundreds of thousands dead. In the real world, not some fictional fantasy. It's almost too terrible to comprehend. 

There's a definite urge to blame - to blame the people who minimized the threat and did everything they could to prevent people from taking sensible precautions. To blame the ones who turned this political, so that some people proudly act as though refusing to wear a mask is some great show of freedom and patriotism. To wonder how many of them believe their own BS, and are honestly just fools... and how many are knowingly and deliberately saying things they are fully aware are false.

To blame people - for being gullible and credulous and believing the BS.

There's plenty of blame to go around. You can even try tracing things back to earlier stages and blame China, though that's a bit like saying Wei Wuxian was responsible for the death of thousands because he rescued a few civilians from a work camp. (i.e. in the broader sense it can be true, but it misses a lot of the steps along the way where different choices would have effected the outcome.)

I have more to write on this, but it's long enough that I'll probably do a separate post. 

Diversity and Language

An interesting post on how language affects the way we think.

I think about this when I think about diversity, because this is why preserving languages (and cultures) matters.

They show different ways of being, all of which are human. 

Credit Where Credit is Due

Since my last couple of posts were pretty negative towards that .01% I figured I'd share an article highlighting the positive -

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2020/09/15/exclusive-the-billionaire-who-wanted-to-die-brokeis-now-officially-broke/amp/

I'm Clearly Not the Only One

https://seananmcguire.tumblr.com/post/629108212108541952